As it is generally known, Web conferencing technology has become an increasingly prevalent way of sharing or disseminating information. Web conferencing systems enable geographically distributed users to participate in a virtual conference over the Internet. The conference is provided to each participant through software executing on their client computer system, such as a Web browser or other client software. Web conferences are “synchronous” meetings, in which all users concurrently participate. This stands in contrast to “asynchronous” Web based systems for sharing information through posted messages, such as on-line discussions known as “forums”, “message boards”, or “bulletin boards”. The most basic feature of a Web conferencing is screen sharing. Screen sharing enables conference participants to view content from a presenter's screen on their own screens.
When presenting a document in a Web conference, there are situations in which it would be advantageous for different participants to be provided with different information. For example, it may be desirable for some participants to see additional metadata that is hidden from other conference attendees. One situation that illustrates this need is when a presentation is shared through a Web conference, the presenter would often like to see a set of speaker notes in addition to the contents of the presentation slide, without sharing those notes with the conference attendees.
In the past, one solution to this problem has been for the conference presenter to view their speaker notes out-of-band of the presentation, such as in a printed hardcopy, or by displaying a separate file in a separate user interface window during the presentation. However, a major drawback of such out-of-band approaches is that the presenter needs to manually keep the out-of-band notes material synchronized with the shared presentation content.
In the area of in-person presentation technology, some existing systems have provided what is known as a “teleprompter” feature. These existing systems have provided a display of speaker notes to a presenter while he or she is making an in-person presentation. Existing systems have fallen short, however, of providing any way to allow different renditions of a shared document to be viewed by different Web conference participants based on their different roles. Existing systems cannot associate different presentation renditions with corresponding participant roles. Accordingly, they cannot be used to support defining multiple renditions of a shared Web conference document, such as a presentation document, and then displaying those renditions during the Web conference such that each participant's specific view of the shared document is determined based on their role in the conference. Moreover, there is no capability in existing systems for allowing roll-based conference renditions to be dynamically changed, during a Web conference, in order to adapt to dynamically changing participant roles. Further, there is no way in existing systems to provide different renditions based on roles, where the roles may be automatically determined based on whether a participant is located in a specific geography, and/or is a member of a specific business organization.
In addition, existing systems have failed to provide shared Web conference content renditions that are specific to individual user attributes. For example, user accessibility settings typically are not considered when a shared document is rendered to a user during a Web conference. Accordingly, if a low vision user has set their display for high contrast, it would be desirable for the rendition of the shared document provided to them to be in high contrast as well. Similarly, if a color blind user has an indication of their color blindness in their user profile, it would be desirable for their rendition of a shared document to use visual clues other than color to provide visual distinctiveness.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a new system for providing different renditions of shared Web conference content based on the roles and user attributes of Web conference participants.